Category Archives: mindfulness

Robert Frost and Mindfulness

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I love the many friends I’ve met in the blog-o-sphere. You “kindred spirits” are cut from the same bolt of cloth as myself. It is exciting to meet men and women from various corners of the world, with different belief systems, who demonstrate what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.” Here is a lovely poem by Robert Frost about the beauty of discovering  presence of mind:

A Considerable Speck
By Robert Frost

A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink,
When something strange about it made me think.
This was no dust spike by my breathing blown,
But unmistakenly a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt—
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic, regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

More re “Our Thoughts Become Us”

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I would like to share further re my variant of Mike Dooley’s wisdom, “Thoughts are things.  Choose the good ones.”  We are teeming with thoughts and these thoughts make up our reality.  According to cognitive behavioral therapy, they shape our behavior even though reciprocally our behavior shapes out thoughts.  It behooves us to pay attention to our thoughts from time to time, perhaps to practice the “mindfulness” taught by the Buddhists, and not allow maladaptive thoughts to hold sway over our lives.

For example, if one realizes that hatred often predominates in his/he heart, he/she needs to be given pause.  In our current political climate, hatred appears to predominate more so than I ever remember.  And I do not mean mere disapproval or dislike of the other party or candidate; that is to be understood.  But pure, unmitigated hatred often appears to be the ruling force in this political campaign and often it is the media which is fomenting this poison.

Let’s take O’Bama.  Now he is a liberal Democrat and I can certainly understand conservatives firmly opposing him and even doing so with great passion.  But when those who find themselves actually hating him  they really need to get honest with themselves and realize they are full of hatred which has nothing to do with O’Bama.

But intense emotion, especially hatred, is a powerful political tool.  People are much more likely to vote on the basis of emotion than reason though they are always going to announce with great conviction the “reasonable” nature of their convictions.

Wisdom from Rumi

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I have discoursed before about the sin of “misplaced concreteness.” I think it was C.S. Lewis who offered the term to me. This sin is the error of taking to be real that which is only ephemeral; and, it is a sin which is intrinsic to human nature. It seems to be so pronounced in our modern world with its insane consumerism but it has always been around in some shape, form, or fashion.

Shakespeare often harped on this issue. I strongly recommend you check out his sonnet 146, one of my favorite. And just recently I came across a quote from Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, who noted, “Everyone is afraid of death, but the real sufi’s just laugh; nothing tyrannizes their heart. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.”

Our task is to always be aware of the “oyster shell” and its tyranny, realizing that inside there is a “pearl of great price” which cries out for attention and respect. I think this is what Jesus had in mind when he posed the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

 

Prayer

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“My words fly up. My thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” King Claudius uttered this lament as he knelt in prayer with young Hamlet hovering nearby with murderous intent.

I think this is one of the pithiest notes about prayer that I’ve ever come across. Shakespeare was saying that for prayer to take place, words and thoughts must be conjoined and offered up wholeheartedly. In other words, there must be a singleness of purpose, a sublime focus. There must be meditation.

Emptiness is All

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Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.

Thus did Lao Tzu encourage us to look to what is not to find meaning for that which is. Now I’m aware of how crazy that sounds. I think it is highly relevant to our current flirtation with the Hoggs Boson particle, that particle which might explain why there is something and not nothing. Ok, ok. I’m aware that that sounds crazy.

But let me put it into plain English. Lao Tzu, Jesus, et al were merely saying, “Hey guys (and gals), things are not as they seem. Look beneath the surface. There lies Reality. Just deign to look at things differently.”   This is relevant to what the philosopher Ricoeur said, “You can’t have a perspective on your perspective without somehow escaping it.”

An Humble Prayer

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Here is a simple poem by Louis Untermeyer on the subject of prayer that I really like. Oh, if I could only write poetry!

Prayer
God, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight – and lose.
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
Open my eyes to vision girt
With beauty, and with with wonder lit –
But let me always see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring’s first flutes and drums –
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
From compromise and things half-done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
– Louis Untermeyer

Jonathan Haidt on Morality & Politics

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Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies morality and emotion and how they vary from culture to culture.  He has an excellent TED talk which I will post below and several other on-line interviews, including one by Stephen Colbert.

Haidt’s studies attempt to address the issue of the human tendency to isolate into groups which become very smug and very dismissive of others.  I am particularly pleased to see him apply his theory to our particular political culture at present moment. He reports that, “Morality, by its very nature, makes it had to study morality.  It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth.  It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups…To live virtuously as individuals and as societies, we must understand how our minds are built.  We must find ways to overcome our natural self-righteousness.  We must respect and even learn from those whose morality differs from our own.”

Now in his TED talk in particular, it is quite apparent that he is a liberal.  But he reports that as a result of his research he was given pause and had to note at one point that the conservative view point has a whole lot to offer. What his research teaches is that we must be given pause, take a look at the other view point, and stop demonizing each other.

This election is not about winning!  If we are so immature that we merely mindlessly want our pony to win the race, then we really need to do some growing up.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

Make The World Go Away.

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I was recently going through a difficult time, experiencing multiple stressors, most of which could be attributed to having been out of my daily orbit, away from the comfort of hearth and home. I had done some traveling abroad and though I enjoyed it immensely, it had been stressful. Upon my return home, I was heading into town to get a new driver’s license (to replace the one lost when my wallet had been lifted in Rome) and I was contemplating several other stressors in my life that had accumulated as a result of the trip abroad. A line from Hamlet flashed through my mind, “Oh, if I could be bound in a nutshell and there be the king of infinite spaces.”

I knew what he meant. I wanted to retreat to my “nutshell”, which would have been my hearth and home, and if I could never, never, ever, ever leave those safe confines then all would be well. I could amuse myself with caring for my lovely dachshunds, my lovely wife, taking care of my yard and garden, feeding the lovely birds which deign to visit me each day, then all would be well. I would need no more! As some old c & w song goes, “Let the world go away…”

But, “mindfulness” immediately visited me and I noted what was going on, noting the lunacy of retreating to any private world, any “nutshell.” Escapism is never anything but escapism To be a human is to be engaged in the world and thus to be subject to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” (Shakespeare). Retreating is always tempting but it is not reality

Yes, the world is ugly. But if I retreat to my “nutshell”, I am still face-to-face with a profound ugliness—my own. I’m reminded of an old bromide from decades ago, “A man who lives by himself, and for himself, will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”

An afterthought—I think the home-schooling people need to be aware of this issue.

Repentence And Shakespeare

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Shakespeare and other poets had something to say about repentence. Shakespeare in one sonnet lamented our tendency to let what Jesus would call “the kingdom within” go unattended while we lavish our attention on the external things, the “things of this world.”

Shakespeare lamented in Sonnet 126

O Soul, the Center of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array
Why doest thou pine with in
And suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward wall so costly gay
Why so large a cost,
Having so short a lease
Doest thou upon this fading mansion spend?

And he concluded this marvelous sonnet with the admonishment, “Within be fed, without be rich no more.”

Shakespeare was addressing the sin of misplaced concreteness, the human tendency to take for real that which was only ephemeral. John Masefield put it like this, describing us as a, “lame donkey lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade and let the Real be.”

The madness of our consumer society illustrates this sin of “misplaced concreteness.” We are so obsessed with “stuff” that we can’t slow down long enough to deal with our own inner emptiness, an experience which could lead to our discovery of our Fullness. I think the TV series on the Hoarders is a beautiful metaphor for this spiritual problem of our culture. True, these people are mentally ill…and grossly so…but they illustrate the profound mental illness of our spiritually bereft culture who daily “chase the shade and let the Real be.”

We need to….dare I say it…”repent.” That merely means we need to turn our attention away from the superficies of existence and focus on the kingdom which is within. And, when we do this we discover what Eckhart Tolle describes as The Power of Now, we discover that the best we can accomplish is getting “to be.”

Waging the War I Am!

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At times we soar. At times we crawl through the mud. But, the sum of it all is that….we be. I wish it was only soaring. But it just ain’t. It seems so much of it is mudding. But, in reality, there has been a whole lot of soaring. It is all a matter of perspective. How do we see things and, if we are honest, how do we choose to see things—is the glass half full or is it half empty?

But, when the curtain call comes, we can only declare that we succeeded the mandate “to be.” And as we pursued that mandate, we hopefully echoed the sentiments of W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are.” Sometimes I think I should rename my blog, “Waging the war I am”!